Wiretap: The one person not to believe in the Rob Porter story is, reportedly, his ex-boss

According to a report from Axios, Donald Trump has been spotted telling a lie. This shouldn’t be surprising, except that what Trump is reportedly saying in private is that former White House aide Rob Porter is “sick” and that he believes the women who have accused him. Publicly, of course, Trump has defended Porter and wished him well while bemoaning that men can have their lives destroyed by “mere” allegations, not to mention a photo from an ex-wife of her black eye. Meanwhile, in the White House, they’re still struggling to get their story straight as to who knew what and when and how it was that Porter was fired/resigned.

Is this — finally — a moment of reckoning for Trump, or at least the beginning of the moment? Will Trump’s longstanding misogyny, made clear again in his recent defense of Rob Porter, be Trump’s undoing? David Remnick seems to think so. He cites none other than Steve Bannon himself. While watching the Golden Globes and its #MeToo theme with journalist Joshua Green, Bannon said, “You watch. The time has come. Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch. This is a definitional moment in the culture. It’ll never be the same going forward.” Via The New Yorker.

As we debate whether Kim Jong-Un’s sister upstaged Mike Pence at the Winter Olympics in South Korea, we should also take time to take note of what a war with North Korea would actually look like. In Vox, Yochi Dreazen writes that a full-blown war with North Korea would not be as bad as you imagine. It would be much, much worse.

Russia was, of course, officially banned from the Winter Olympics for systemic doping issues, but, in a decision that still has some people shaking heads, Russian athletes were invited to participate, and nearly 170 are there in South Korea. So Russia is at the Olympics and it’s not at the Olympics. There’s no Russian National Anthem at the medals ceremony, but there is wild celebration when a Russian wins. Somehow it all seems fitting. Via The New York Times.

Michelle Cottle writes in The Atlantic that the battles over the #MeToo movement seem to be mostly among women, with men clinging to the sidelines. This intra-gender debate feels appropriate, Cottle writes, but she wonders if watching women break into factions, often generational, over #MeToo is too much like the Mommy Wars and will hold the movement back.

And so the Senate is set to begin the promised debate over immigration and the fate of the Dreamers. And no one has any idea what will happen. Can the Senate reach a compromise, and, if it does, is it one that Paul Ryan allow a vote on it in the House? And what about the president? Well, that’s always the question. Via The Washington Post.

By deciding not to shut down the government over immigration and the Dreamers, Democrats are obviously playing politics, but what kind? Are they playing the long game — in which they knew they couldn’t win the battle now, but that they may be in much better shape to do so after the 2018 midterms? Or are they playing the short game, in which the lack of a settlement is a sure way to energize Latino voters as the midterms approach? Via Slate.

Many conservatives, especially those in Congress, seem to have forgotten how, when Barack Obama was president, the national debt was the greatest crisis facing the nation. Well, at The National Review, they still remember.

What teens learn from online porn — a question parents may not even want to consider — and what we might do to help them unlearn it. Via The New York Times.

Andrew Sullivan writes in New York magazine that when he writes about campus culture, he is beset by critics who tell him that college safe spaces are college safe spaces and that there’s no real-world equivalent, so why write about it? He grants that the argument makes sense, but wonders if we don’t all live on college campuses now. (Editor’s note: We should be so lucky.)

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While one lesser known columnist claims, “(President) Trump’s general approval rating is about 40 percent. That’s the lowest for any president in the polling era after one year on the job. ”, it appears that statement may be closer to wishful thinking than fact.

According to Newsweek, “President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, have at least one thing in common: identical approval and disapproval ratings in one national poll after their first year in office.”

Victor Davis Hanson believes “We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal.” because government officials failed to tell the FISA court that “warrant requests were based on an unverified dossier that had originated as a hit piece funded in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump during the current 2016 campaign”. There appears to be a lot of there there.

New York Times editor and opinion writer Bari Weiss is one of several women who believe “The hard left is basically saying it’s OK if a few innocent men go down with the ship if that’s what it takes to bring down the patriarchy. They hate zero tolerance on the right when it comes to drug policy but they love zero tolerance when it comes to sexual misconduct.”

Remember Hillary Clinton? It’s been 15 months since she lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump but, like so many of her supporters who continue to whine “But she got 3 million more votes” , seems unable to accept her loss. Joanna Weiss writing in Politico gently suggests it’s time for Mrs. Clinton to move on.

“Have you heard the latest nursery rhyme? It goes like this: Hillary and Obama went up the hill. They both came down in handcuffs.” Well, if haven’t you might want to read this Las Vegas Review-Journal opinion which also points out, “The latest respected Rasmussen poll is out. Trump’s approval rating is 48 percent. That makes Trump more popular than Obama at the exact same date of his presidency. On Feb. 7, 2010, Obama was at 44 percent. On Feb. 7, 2018, Trump was at 48 percent.” There’s a lot of there there.

Thanks for the daily propaganda reels sourced from Drudge and the right wingnutosphere, Comrade Don, Putin would be proud, your drill sergeant, probably not so much. They still court marshal traitors no?

Back on planet earth, the vast majority of Americans would like the world to know, as the article implies, that Trump and his band of wife-beating racists don’t in any way represent even a sizeable minority of our population. The glitch will get fixed shortly…people are working on it now.

Yes, now apparently you’re starting to see the problem, Comrade Don. With Russia’s help, one of their agents posing as a politician was able to exploit a weakness in our electoral system for the first time in modern history to get “elected” by a minority of voters*. Your support for this treasonous act is why you are no longer able to wear the colors with honor not to mention why Mueller is about to take a giant dump on Trump and the complicit members of the Republican party.

*Remember that even though W also lost the popular vote (how’d that work out for us) he was appointed by the conservative members of the Supreme Court.

Now that you’re once again showing your belly, why don’t we work on the myths of trickle down economics and wmds in Iraq.

Or maybe just crawl back under the bridge with the rest of the trolls instead of copying and pasting far right wingnut propaganda here…cause this would be more fun if you were smart enough to put together cogent points.

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